How Philanthropists Used Music To Push For Social Change In 19th-Century America

Amanda Moniz of the National Museum of American History writes about the Hutchinson Family Singers (who campaigned for the abolition of slavery), the Fisk Jubilee Singers (who raised funds for Fisk University, which was founded to educate former slaves), and the concerts by the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston to benefit Russian Jewish refugees.

When Dick Cavett Ruled Thinking America’s TV

For three decades, Mr. Cavett was the thinking person’s Johnny Carson, embodiment of an East Coast sophisticate. He wore smart turtlenecks and double-breasted blazers, had more cultural references than a Google server and laced martini-dry witticisms into lengthy, probing talks with 20th-century luminaries including Bette DavisJames BaldwinMick Jagger and Jean-Luc Godard. A Renaissance salon in a rabbit-ears era, “The Dick Cavett Show” was woke some 50 years before the term came into vogue.

Furtwangler and the Nazis

Joseph Horowitz, whose Understanding Toscanini (1987) deals extensively with the American career of Wilhelm Furtwängler, traditionally seen as an artistic opposite pole to Arturo Toscanini, reviews Roger Allen’s Wilhelm Furtwängler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical.

On Long Island, Jackson Pollock And Lee Krasner’s Home Had So Many Visitors That Neighbors Complained, Asking For Limits

“The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, which is operated by the Stony Brook Foundation, the nonprofit fundraising agency of Stony Brook University, attracted hundreds of visitors per day to the Springs Fireplace Road site. A record 350 people visited the home one day last year, center director Helen Harrison said.” Now, after complaints, the visitors are limited to three tours of 12 people, three days a week.

An Author – And A Refugee – Reflects On Losing His Own Child To The Joys Of Reading

Viet Thanh Nguyen: “Seeing my son reading, I realize he is taking one step further on his own road to independence, to being a border-crosser, someone who makes his own decisions, including what he reads and what he believes. Perhaps that’s why seeing him read on his own is tinged with melancholy. I remember my own loss and I sense the loss that is yet to come, when he is no longer all mine.”

The Internet Lit Up As Patrick Stewart Confirmed He Is Returning To ‘Star Trek’

Stewart, who last played Captain Jean-Luc Picard in a 2002 movie, said, “During these past years, it has been humbling to hear many stories about how ‘The Next Generation’ brought people comfort, saw them through difficult periods in their lives or how the example of Jean-Luc inspired so many to follow in his footsteps, pursuing science, exploration and leadership. … I feel I’m ready to return to him for the same reason — to research and experience what comforting and reforming light he might shine on these often very dark times.”